Female Ejaculation and Other Delights

Whatever the science, the G-spot has infiltrated the popular culture to such an extent few men or women seem to doubt its existence; the sex-toy shop Babeland.com stocks 65 styles of vibrators and dildos designed to reach the area. So in August 2001, when Terence Hines, a professor of psychology at Pace University and an adjunct professor of neurology at New York Medical College, portrayed the spot as fanciful, echoing criticism heard in 1982 after the release of The G Spot, he found a target drawn on his groin. A dedicated skeptic (his book Pseudoscience and the Paranormal is in its second edition, and he’s a research fellow with a group that debunks alternative medical therapies), Hines speaks about the G-spot with the glee of a man who enjoys a good pissing match. When a student in an introductory physiology course asked about it during a discussion of human sexuality, Hines assumed its existence had been proved. But when he reviewed the medical literature, he was underwhelmed. In a scathing commentary published on August 28, 2001 in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Hines said he could find only two clinical studies, neither close to convincing. A 1981 case study by Belzer, Perry, Whipple and others involved a woman who experienced “deeper” orgasms and whose anterior vaginal wall appeared to grow about 50 percent during arousal. A 1983 review by Whipple and five colleagues involved gynecologists who first underwent three hours of training before being asked to determine if any of 11 women had a G-spot (four did). Besides the fact the subjects knew what researchers were looking for, which certainly introduced bias, writes Hines, “it is astonishing that the examination of only 12 women, of whom only five ‘had’ G-spots, form the basis for the claim that this anatomic structure exists.”

In his coup de grâce, Hines concludes that without more definitive research, “the G-spot will remain a sort of gynecological UFO.” That catchy phrasing immediately generated buzz, including invitations from women who offered to show Hines their spots firsthand, but the 9/11 attacks pushed the debate out of the news. Hines says he’s surprised no one in the eight years since has answered his challenge, which Clara Peller might have presented as, Where’s the nerves? While Gräfenberg mentions nerves inside the anterior wall of the vagina, he cites another study, which Hines says offers no source and mentions it only in the course of dismissing the idea the vagina has nerves. Hines says he had hoped his commentary would be an introduction to definitive research he would conduct himself; he planned to dissect the front vaginal wall of a number of female cadavers (tricky but not impossible, he says) and use medical staining to search for nerve bundles. However, he says the Catholic officials who run the New York Medical College refused to allow it.

Have any studies since 2001 given him pause? A handful have been intriguing, he says. For instance, the title of a 2006 Journal of Sexual Medicine report—“Prospective Study Examining the Anatomic Distribution of Nerve Density in the Human Vagina”—suggested to Hines that the histological research he longed to see had been completed. “Alas, no,” he says. “The subjects were surgical patients, and the tissue was biopsy samples, not the entire anterior vaginal wall. In fact, the authors write, ‘We did not document a corresponding increase in innervation in the anterior vagina. However, we do not claim this is proof the G-spot does not exist.’ That’s the correct conclusion but also offers support for my position.”

Two years later Hines dog-eared another study in the same journal. A team led by Dr. Emmanuele Jannini, a professor of experimental medicine at the University of L’Aquila in Italy, took high-definition ultrasound images of the genitalia of 20 volunteers. He found the nine women who said they had G-spot orgasms had slightly thicker tissue (by about two millimeters) along the upper wall between the vagina and urethra than the clitoral-orgasm group did. Although his study was small, Jannini nevertheless claims he has proven some women don’t have Gspots. But Hines isn’t sure how Jannini can be so certain, given that he defines the G-spot as “the human clitoris-urethrovaginal complex.” This, Hines notes, “extends the size of the zone quite a bit—why not just say it’s the entire vagina? What I think is going on here is that if the vaginal tissue is thicker, the vaginal space is smaller. In other words, the woman is tighter—and everyone has a better time regardless of the relative number of neurons.” Other factors could also be at play in whether a woman responds to vaginal stimulation, including the size of her clitoris, her state of arousal and the strength of the hammock-like pubococcygeus muscle, which has a direct line to the sexual center of the brain via the pudendal and pelvic nerves.

Along with many feminist writers, Hines says his criticism comes out of a concern that the notion of a hypersensitive area sets women up for failure. “Women who don’t respond to stimulation, as the G-spot myth suggests they should, may end up feeling inadequate or abnormal,” he writes. Ed Belzer has had the same reservations. “I was speaking years ago to a couple about sex therapy,” he says, “and when the husband brought up the G-spot the wife chimed in, ‘I don’t want to hear about this. It took me long enough to accept myself without having another hurdle to get across.’ We’ve always been sensitive about that; it’s not an athletic achievement.” For many, the “discovery” of the G-spot only ratcheted up what JoAnn Loulan describes in Lesbian Sex as “the tyranny of orgasm”—women are expected, like men, to be satisfied only if they reach the “goal” of climax.

Naturally, every prominent G-spot researcher took issue with Hines’s conclusions. Whipple and Perry could barely contain themselves, noting the critic had cited only 24 of more than 250 studies on the matter before dropping this anvil on his head: “By saying the G-spot is a myth, Hines has now contributed to denying women’s sexual response and pleasurable experiences.” Dr. Jules Black, a prominent obstetrician in Australia, wrote Hines personally: “If the phenomenon cannot yet be explained to the nth degree physiologically, anatomically, biochemically, histologically, histochemically, etc., so what? There are many bodily functions where the pathways from cause to effect aren’t fully worked out. For years I have been telling Beverly Whipple to get some of her proven research subjects to will their vaginas to science so that we can reverse engineer them.”

Some have tried. In The Human Female Prostate, a summary of 150 vaginal dissections he has conducted, pathologist Milan Zaviacic of Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia says he found about 70 percent of women have ramp-shaped meatus prostates, with the thickest part of the tissue located near the urethra. Further, he counted as many as 31 microscopic ducts emptying into the urethra, most in the front third. Next, there’s the 15 percent of women with posterior prostates, in which the thickest part is located closest to the bladder. Seven percent of women have a middle prostate distributed along the length of the urethra but with a smaller concentration in the middle, like a dumbbell. The final type, the rudimentary prostate, found in about eight percent of women, has few glands and ducts. Why is this important? Because, Zaviacic writes, “the main part of the female prostate tissue does not correspond with the topological placement of the G-spot.” That may explain, says Deborah Sundahl, author of Female Ejaculation and the G-Spot, why some women have trouble finding the zone. “They are looking too far back in the vagina and missing the location of the most common meatus prostate, which is just inside the vagina, near the urethra, or not far back enough, which is where the posterior prostate can best be felt,” she writes. This variability is one reason many researchers reject the term female prostate—the male prostate has a highly defined size, shape and location; the female version is apparently a vagabond shape-shifter.

If a G-spot can’t be found, does it exist? In a 2002 study, Jannini at the University of L’Aquila reported dissections of the pelvic regions of 14 female cadavers had revealed two women who did not have erectile tissue along the front inner wall of their vagina and five who did not have paraurethral glands (sometimes called the Skene’s glands, after a doctor who described them in 1880 but believed them to be inactive), which may account for female ejaculation. Three years later anatomist Dr. Helen O’Connell proposed that the G-spot may never be found because it’s not a separate structure that can be identified through dissections or scans. Instead, it’s part of two erectile bulbs that extend from a highly sensitive external nub into the body, where they wrap around the urethra and vagina. The G-spot, she suggests, is the unseen clitoris.

Like the G-spot, the phenomenon of female ejaculation has had its doubters. Although descriptions of women emitting fluids as they climax date to at least the fourth century, Alfred Kinsey, whose opinions held great weight following the 1948 publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, wasn’t buying it, arguing that any expulsion was surely just lubrication from the vaginal walls pushed out, sometimes at great force, by orgasmic contractions. William Masters reached the same conclusion. Despite the praise he offered for Josephine Sevely’s research (“the lady certainly has done her homework”), he and Virginia Johnson derided the idea of female ejaculation as “erroneous.” John Perry recalls that the woman who first piqued his and Whipple’s curiosity had years earlier sought out Masters, who dismissed the sugary fluid she emitted as a sign she was “prediabetic.” The famed researcher had a chance to stake his claim on the G-spot, Perry says, “had he not assumed unusual symptoms were inherently pathological.”'

The woman had been introduced to Whipple and Perry in 1979 by her doctor; she agreed to demonstrate in a lab with the assistance of her husband, who used his fingers to massage her anterior vaginal wall. (This would become the 1981 case study cited by Terence Hines.) With her urethra under a bright light, and while being filmed, the woman came and ejaculated three times in less than five minutes, creating wet spots anywhere from a centimeter to more than three feet away. The team later collected four samples by pressing a drinking glass against her taint. A biochemical analysis showed the liquid contained more tartrateinhibited acid prosphatase (thought to be prostatic) and glucose and less urea and creatinine than urine. Subsequent studies of female ejaculate would identify prostate-specific antigens (PSA), which are also produced by the male prostate. Whipple and Perry say the volume of clear or milky-white fluid typically fills no more than a quarter teaspoon; there is no “gushing” as described in ancient erotica and by Gräfenberg or seen in modern porn. They explain the discrepancy by noting that people are prone to exaggerate, such as happens with self-reports of menstrual blood (in reality it’s usually about four tablespoons) and semen (about one teaspoon). Yet many women insist they soak the sheets; the females of more than one “primitive” African tribe have been said to spray the walls. Gary Schubach devoted his doctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco to figuring out why some women may at best squirt their partner in the eye while others waterboard them. Each of seven volunteers masturbated in a lab until they were near orgasm. Schubach then inserted a catheter and drained each woman’s bladder, keeping the device in place to isolate the fluid originating there at orgasm. Then each woman continued to masturbate until she climaxed and ejaculated, an exercise in concentration that any man who has awoken from surgery with a tube sticking out of his penis can appreciate. Schubach and his colleagues observed about 95 percent of the fluid at climax came from the catheter, even though the bladder had been drained only minutes before. And this was a gush by any standard: from a half liter to a liter of fluid. Although analysis showed the liquid had been “de-urinized” (it contained only 25 percent of the urea in pee), Schubach hypothesized that it must have come from the walls of the bladder and new kidney production. The other five percent of the fluid, “in some women and at some times,” likely came from the paraurethral glands.

When Perry read Schubach’s study in 1997, he admits, it made him rethink his position that women who “gush” something other than urine exist only in the erotic imagination. He wondered if the fluid might be similar to “beer piss”—the diluted urine produced on the fly when you are emotionally or physically aroused (such as while watching a big game, hitting on a woman at a bar or having sex) and find you have an immediate urge to pee. The debate comes down to this: Is anything that passes through the bladder by definition urine? Whipple says yes, that only expulsions from the paraurethral glands are female ejaculate— since it’s nearly impossible for men to urinate and ejaculate at the same time, why shouldn’t that also be the case for women? Schubach—and now Perry—says the ejaculate comes sometimes from the urethra, sometimes from the bladder, and sometimes it’s a mixture. It may be that every woman ejaculates but the fluid usually flows back into the bladder. (One study found PSA levels in female urine to be higher after orgasm than before.) Whatever the case, why would this evolve? Is ejaculation designed to keep the flow moving outward to prevent urinary or bladder infections? Is it produced as “washback” (seen in other mammals) to flush out excess sperm or sperm deposited by an earlier suitor? Perhaps men deserve some credit for its evolutionary survival: If you mate with a female who gets so aroused when you do her doggy style that she spurts all of a rival’s future offspring into the dirt, you’ll be damn sure to find others like her. Some scientists suggest this is why semen has gotten thicker over the eons; it’s harder to wash away. More food for thought: The fructose in female ejaculate happens to be sperm’s favorite meal. Perhaps ejaculate gives them a boost, like race officials handing Gatorade to marathon runners. At the finish line waits the next generation of ejaculators.

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